


Letters

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Sally Face (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Discussion of Major Character Death, Episode 4: The Trial, F/M, Friendship, Gen, I felt compelled to write some of my feelings, Spoilers, headcanons, hurt and a little bit of comfort, this takes place before the final scene of Episode 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 14:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16812265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Ashley finally sends a letter she’s been putting together for a long time.





	Letters

**Author's Note:**

> AhhhHHH, my heart. This episode wrecked me. I finished my first playthrough earlier, and then when I sat down to write this I just couldn't stop... So many feelings, dang it. 
> 
> I'm truly sorry for any mistakes I made!!! I tried to think of where Ashley's head might be, ahaha.... Ha. (Imagine laugh-crying here, please?) Thank you for reading. :)

Ashley Campbell didn’t have the right words to gather up and throw over to her friend Sal like a life preserver in deep, angry water, now. As they led him away in stiff orange clothes, an even stiffer verdict hanging around his neck and a handful of years left to live; as she stood, arms limp and helpless, Maple rubbing her wrist like maybe a gentle touch could ease her back down into her chair. Maple had expected this to happen, though Ash knew she tiptoed around saying so outright. Not everyone tried so hard, and Maple had reason to be angry, of course. Of course.

Ash wanted to shake Maple’s fingers away – she wanted to scream so raggedly it would break the sky, again, or at least the judge’s heart. She called, “I’m going to fight this! You _know_ I’m going to fight this!” and she got scolded again. The judge thwacked his gavel on the table. Strangers glared at her, as if she’d chosen to side with a crafty, unrepentant murderer over the carved-up dead found dripping blood into their sofas and carpets and ruined, normal-enough lives. Found with slashed faces and gory throats and familiar clothes gone red and sticky and –

Oh, God.

Maybe Ashley didn’t mean to look at the Speaker of the Jury with so much blame and raw hurt and… Well. _And hate._ Maybe she didn’t, but she probably did.

Maple had a picture of herself with Chug and their daughter displayed in her new apartment, right where anyone could see. She didn’t smile or cry when she talked about them, normally. Maybe something in her looked like it was going blurry and drifting away.

Ashley didn’t smile or cry when she promised to fight, either – Ash would have told you she never cried, to be honest – though she was trying to look Sal Fisher right in his eye as she said it. She wasn’t sure she managed that, mind you. She could only really see his glass eye through his hair, just then, from where she was sitting. And only just a little, little bit. He had nodded after the judge spoke, once or twice, and then never lifted his head back up. He had suspected this slow, creeping death was coming for him too, probably. He had offered over what words he had – what truths he had – like it was his last chance to do it, and like it would be alright if nothing more came for him than that.

Truth was all he had left, Sal had said. Not a future, not hope, not a friend. This awful, impossible truth, and a grim chance to speak it. Maybe it would’ve been strange if he _had_ met Ashley’s burning gaze. What would he have even done – smiled at her behind his mask? No, he didn’t call it that, he’d never called it that... Ashley hadn’t listened. From behind his _prosthetic_. Would he have smiled like he was trying to reassure her, a lying smile like weak tea? Would he have glared, betrayed and furious and broken? Would he have winked his good eye, like this was all some kind of elaborate, devastating practical joke?

Ashley thought maybe Sal’s truth was meant for her, even so, out of everyone gathered there. It was _meant_ for anyone who could work to fix things long, long broken, sure… But she liked to think Sal still believed she could be a person like that, sometimes. She wouldn’t have admitted it, no, but she _did_ daydream about a time in the bright smeary watercolor future – after she got the verdict overturned, somehow, after she got Sal out into the sun and wearing his old ripped-up jeans again – where he would tell her he’d been trying to reach _her_. That he’d felt like maybe _she_ would still fight for his cause, after everything. And then they would both know she had, _she had_ , and not in the way he’d wanted her to – (which he would say was the wrong way, by then, once he’d gotten a little help.) They would both know she had, and someday she’d set up a bed for him at her place while he was trying to get back on his feet… And she’d get Sal to add little secret touches to her paintings, pulling him in to lean over her shoulder like she used to… And they’d watch the same movies and talk about them when they were supposed to be asleep.

Someday. Not right away. Ash would wait, and Sal would heal, and she’d promise everything could be worth living through. She would write letters. She would send birthday presents, maybe. She would remind him he was human, and not an evil man.

She hoped she was right about all that every day, but she wouldn’t tell Sal _that_ part. She had already tried to write letters, but she ended up crumpling them all into a drawer at her desk. Tearing them apart or scribbling them out, rewriting them and then doing it all over again and again. Some of the letters turned into angry, screaming things – some of the letters had secrets in them. It would’ve been better if she had told Sal those secrets back when he was a free man, maybe. When he’d responded to texts almost as soon as he saw them, and been the kind of guy to accidentally leave his phone out on the porch… So if he was MIA, that was probably why. He was never very, very far away.

Ashley just made her vows in the courtroom – so many letters unsent – as strangers shuffled away back to their lives and guards led Sally Face down a dark hallway and out to a very serious-looking prison transport van.

“Did he look over this way? At all?” Ashley asked Maple, only once, as they were making dinner together. Ash didn’t want to go back to her own place, riding all alone with her thoughts, just yet. Maple had asked her to chop a couple tomatoes, and so she was chopping as carefully as she could with shaking hands. They had the TV on in the background – not the news, not anything real and ready to bite them. A sitcom, and not anything Maple’s Chug had liked. Not anything Sal had ever talked about, either. Something new, to clear the air like opening a window. Really it was more of a Band-Aid, placebo kind of effect, Ashley thought. It was more like Maple’s sugary air fresheners.

“I don’t know,” Maple said, softly. Staring down at the chicken she was washing in the sink. It was pinkish and dripping, and Maple was probably thinking about so much blood. Bad timing, maybe. “I couldn’t really look at him, to tell you the truth. I looked at the judge. And at you. And the wall.”

That made sense.

…

Truth be told, Ashley didn’t watch Sal’s press interview until after the trial. She’d recorded it, but passing by the unlabeled VHS tape on her counter had been like knowing she’d just sliced her hand open and as soon as she looked down there would be blood on her cutting knife. Blood soaking into Maple’s innocent tomatoes. She hadn’t wanted to see him like that, hadn’t wanted to watch the knowing way the interviewer responded to whatever story he was telling. Ash had seen Sal on the newspapers. The “Sally Face Killer,” as people were calling him, twisting his nickname into something from a horror film. She had seen his messy hair and glaring eye and hopeless, slumped shoulders. She had seen, but all she could think was pain and static, sometimes.

She wanted him back, yes. She kept telling herself he needed help, he needed help. She kept telling herself she would be able to help at the trial, help then, help somehow.

After Maple went to bed, Ashley took the recording of Sal’s interview and stuffed it messily in the VCR. Her hands felt sticky and cold, and she sat back on her heels as the tape started up. She kept the volume so, so quiet, so Maple could sleep as well as possible. Maple said she’d been able to sleep through Sal and Larry demonstrating their music in the next room over, before, way back when, but now she said things like that as if thinking about a book she’d read as a little kid. Someone else’s memories.

Sometimes Ashley wondered if this was all a bad dream version of her life, and she’d wake up late for class at art school. She’d wake up and still have a chance to come home all over again. Sal would notice she’d cut her hair. Sal would lean into her shoulder just a little, little bit when she hugged him hello. She’d stay with him, this time, and everything would be better. Daydreams like that hurt to swallow, so Ash tried not to let them linger too long in her mind.

She hadn’t expected them to use her as a weapon against Sal, at the end of the interview. She hadn’t expected him to cry just a little into the newspaper that wore her name like a brand in the headline. He’d be tasting salt and trying to keep silent. Biting his lip, maybe, behind the mask – prosthetic! – and blinking hard.

What had he been afraid Ashley was going to say, testifying against him? Did the thought that she knew what he’d done – that she might have given up on him, that she was here to see justice worked like the world was black and white or solid or fair – feel like a newly peeled-open wound? Or maybe even just _seeing_ her would’ve hurt, too. Seeing her and remembering what the four of them had been, before. What school had been like, and the futures they’d all imagined sprawling after. Seeing her and remembering that this was the same world as they’d lived in before. The same Nockfell, the same dirt and air and fragile, sour sunlight. Maybe seeing Ash would make everything real, again.

But that hadn’t been all of it – he _could_ have been seeing Ash in a different context, Ash who made it clear she missed him, Ash who believed in him. She _was_ being called in by the prosecutor, after all. She had allowed herself to be silent and far away, before he saw those words and thought she’d chosen to stand solidly against him. Maybe he had been afraid of hearing his last best friend calling him to die.

Ashley stopped the tape. She thought about cracking it apart over her knee – thought about how satisfying the crunch of the plastic might be, and the unraveling, the _rejecting_ – but she didn’t. She slid the tape back into her purse. She was going to need to watch that tape again and again and again, she reminded herself, so she could gather up the tools and evidence to work out new plans of attack. She would stop the tape before Sal heard about her, next time. She would stop it before he cried and crumpled up her name the way she’d tossed away so many letters.

They had both given up so many times, in little ways, letting hopes fall away one by one. Ash had never thought that’s what would become of her, growing up, and she definitely hadn’t expected it for somebody who tried so hard to be kind, the way Sal had when they were young.

Speaking of letters, Ashley borrowed some of Maple’s pretty stationary – the stuff she used to write thank-you notes, stuffed in a cabinet over the telephone. She didn’t think Maple would mind. This particular pack had dripping wisteria flowers over the top, and petals fallen down among the rest of the page. They drifted softly over the lines, like they’d been forgotten there. Like they belonged to that soft-paper world, and the space meant for writing on worked like steps or a pathway or something. It was very purple, that paper. Maple had always liked purple, though a softer lilac-y kind than Ash tended to wear.

Ashley didn’t start this next, fresh letter knowing exactly what she’d say to Sally Face. It was like reaching out in the dark and hoping he’d reach back at least a little before the end. Hoping they could write back and forth, and she’d learn to know his voice again bit by bit.

 _“You aren’t alone,”_ Ashley wrote. _“I meant what I said.”_

And other things, too, of course. She asked Sal to put her on his visitors list, if he wanted her to come by and talk for a while… She said she knew a prisoner “like him” – she didn’t say someone on “death row,” not then, though the words burned in the back of her throat like unshed tears – couldn’t get visitors often, but… Sometimes. Around Halloween, maybe. He’d liked Halloween a lot, once upon a time. Ashley didn’t cross anything out, even when she wanted to. She didn’t crumple up Maple’s nice paper, and she signed her name very honestly for anyone to read.

Part of Ashley didn’t expect Sal Fisher to respond, after the trial, after the blood, and another part of her didn’t expect to recognize his handwriting if he did. As if all of this had changed something innate about him, as innate as the way he’d hold a pen, or say her name, or – anything. Everything.

But she was wrong about the handwriting, first off, and the response letter came sooner than she’d expected it. It was short… And shaky… And reading it scared her… But it was a start, and she wrote back by the end of the day.


End file.
